If you aren’t seeking an incredible gaming PC, with whopping performances, but you seek one that can run any game, with decent resolution and details, for a good price, the Systemax Venture VX2 is your stop. At a fixed price of $1,999, the system has a fixed configuration and comes with a 500 watt power supply. Unfortunately, this power supply could get you in trouble if you plan to install some extreme graphics cards in SLI.It’s design is not much improved, from the standard cases, using a midtower one, that looks quite basic. It’s single pluses are the FireWire port, microphone and headphone jacks and the two USB 2.0 ports located in it’s front side, making peripherals installing easier.

The Systemax Venture VX2 has a DVD burner and a DVD reader, which facilitates the disc to disc copy and makes your job easier. Also, inside the case you won’t find cables as you’d find in any other PC, being only the SATA cable and the ones that power the optical drives. This makes a much easier component installation and removal and let’s you see what’s in, without being forced to remove the cables and then put them back.

The system uses an Intel D975XBX motherboard, which is not the first preference of gamers and hardware geeks, because of the poor support for SLI, only supporting ATI Crossfire for a dual card configuration. Probably an Nvidia 680i would be a much better option. But Systemax thought at that and installed a 512MB graphics card in the system, an ATI Radeon X1950 XTX, which is one of the top ones. Also, another option was the GeForce 8800 GTS, which is in the same price range with the X1950, but uses newer technologies and supports DirectX 10.

Being powered by a 2.66Ghz Intel Core 2 Duo E6700 processor, with 2GB of DDR2 RAM, at 800Mhz and two 250GB HDD @7,200 RPM in RAID 0 makes it a good gaming system, especially at it’s low price of $1,999.
Also, it’s Vista compatible and upgrading to it is an easy job. It’s performances will create you no problems with Vista and the system will run nice and clean.